Andy Mowat: From Four Unicorns to Driving The Future of RevOps

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I am excited to introduce Andy Moet, founder of Whisperd. And Andy is such an interesting individual, and I'm so excited to have him on the podcast. He has run RevOps and demand gen for 4 unicorns: Upwork, Box, Culture Amp, and Kardeh. Andy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks, Amy. It's great to be here. Big fan of what you guys are doing at Fullcast.

Oh, thank you so much. It, it's absolutely phenomenal to be able to have you on the podcast today and talk about your background and your experience, what's next for you and what you're seeing in the market. Can you start by just telling us a little bit about your background?

Yeah, I had a non-traditional early background. I was business school and then ran a company in Eastern Europe for Credit Suisse, and then I came back for Stanford for business school, did 7 years with a wealthy family, and then realized tech was changing the world. So I joined Upwork, learned I was really good at RevOps and have been doing it ever since. I've run RevOps at 4 unicorns. I have also run demand gen at 2 of those. And periodically along the way, I start companies.

That's amazing. And, and Whisperd is one of those companies.

Whisperd is one of them.

Very exciting about what you're doing. We'll find out more about what you're doing a little bit later. So I have a couple of questions for you. My first question is, How did you strategically place yourself at 4 different unicorns? That is such a phenomenal, like, and it's not luck. You can't, I'm, I always say I'd rather be lucky than good, but what I'm seeing from you, that is not luck. That is strategy.

I got unlucky when I graduated from business school. So I went into Stanford in '99. I graduated in '01. That'll tell people how old I am. And when I came out, there were no jobs. Like I was unemployed for 6 months and it burned me. and it taught me a lot, right? Like how to hustle, how to get, how to be really articulate. So, you know, the first time they, I, I got really good at being really clear in what I want, explaining my background, articulating it well. So I'll give a couple. One is I talked my way in the door to Fabio, the CEO of Elance at the time, which became Upwork, um, just by being really clear in what company I wanted, leveraging network, leveraging connections. When I was wrapping up another startup, I was like, oh crap, I'm a CEO. You know, it like, no one's gonna be able to figure me out. But I was like, what am I really good at? What's changing in the world right now, which was customer success. And I'm really good at the operations. And so I ended up getting hired at Box to run all post-sale operations. And, and so I become really good at that. And after my last startup, I was like, oh man, I'm gonna have to do this again. 'Cause I was a CEO, a failed CEO again. And so I just called all my friends and I said, listen, tell me what you're seeing in the market. And they all shared that and they whispered that to me. And then tell me about all the roles that you're seeing with recruiters. And they shared it with me. And so I was able to be incredibly articulate and go run 65, 70 people at Carta to run all of RevOps there. So I think that's a lot of what I've taken of like being really clear, being articulate, being focused, and leveraging your network. And that's a big part of the foundation of Whisperd.

I love that you are building on all of your experience, both good and bad, to build something new and different. That's really exciting. I also find it fascinating that you're so transparent because you could very much just say, yeah, I, it's been nothing but a hockey stick for me. I've run demand gen and rev ops for 4 unicorns, but it's, I find it interesting that you include some of the other learning experiences along the way when you talk about your journey.

Yeah, I've heard somebody else say that to me today too, was how super transparent I am. And I think it's, I think it's important. Like, you, when you look back on the story on your career, it's easy to tell a nice polished version, but I think some, and people are always like, what would you do differently? I'm like, nothing, because I, I am who I am because of that scar. And it was deep, right? Like in 2001, it was like all half my class had no offers. And so that happened in '01. It hap— I was also searching in '08. It happened in '08 and it will happen again sometime. And so tho— those things, I think people take their careers for granted until their middle career and they're like, oh, this is hard. And right now this is a hard economy.

It is. It's a hard economy. I remember, so '08's an interesting time that you mentioned because that's when I started working full-time.

Mm-hmm.

I was not planning on working full-time. I was working part-time. I was raising children and my husband lost his job. He got a job with Lehman Brothers one month before they bankrupt. And so, we were stuck and he had just blown out his back and we were kind of in dire straits. And so, I was like, "Well, there is only one thing that can be done and that is what I will do, which is go back to work full-time." And it was the best decision. And it turned out that what I thought was such a difficult experience turned out to be such an amazing experience. So, I think you're right. It just shapes you for who you are.

I love that. One other thing I'd add on careers and then we can bounce to the RevOps side is, I found like every one of the 4 unicorns I've been at, if you execute really well and you're effective cross-functionally, people hand you more, right? So every single one of them, I've effectively doubled my responsibilities or grown my responsibilities within the first 6 to 9 months. And so it's like I was at Box running post-sale ops and I got a call from the CEO. He is like, I hear you're good. Can you also take over Mops? Right? So I was like, whoa, I guess I'm learning Mops. And so I think that's a power of good people that are super intense and can be effective in broader orgs. I also remember early on I was really like, I don't want to go to a big company. And I went to Box. I'm like, wow, this is really well run. And there you learn so many patterns and so many things that you can take to other places. So I always encourage people in their careers, like, don't avoid those big companies just because you think they're bureaucratic. There are some that are badly run. There are some that are amazingly well run.

I love that. I think it's also interesting what you said just now. We could do two podcasts on him, how we were originally going to talk.

Yeah, we could. I just did a one with, uh, Wilma recently on VP of RevOps career, so we could tell that.

Well, there's, there's so much that, so many insights that you have. It's amazing. But anyway, let's, let's actually turn over to the RevOps piece of it now. I, I just wanted to say one last thing about it that I find it fascinating that not only are you super transparent, but You also are eager to take on additional new challenges, and I think that that is such an incredible piece of wisdom for especially all of us that are, you know, either mid, mid-career or even beginning careers to just take it on, learn it, and don't be afraid of the challenge.

It will blow you up sometimes though. I, you know, when I took on the MOPS one, I had two bosses and different priorities, and when I took on DemandGen, like, you You know, marketing teams are always weirdly organized. And so like, it'll go from, ah, I'm doing really well in my current role to like, I'm way outta my comfort zone. So it, it, there's a balance to it. I've gotten good now when I get that ask for more, take on more, like, okay, great. But I know the questions to ask and how to approach it better.

Well, that's awesome. So when we talk about the future, you know, you saw technology, right? You worked for a wealthy family for 7 years and then you saw technology as the way of the future. You could see that crystal ball, what's next? You're deep in the trenches of RevOps technology, business tech. What's coming?

I think when we talk specifically about like GTM tech in particular, I think data will rewire it all. Everyone's talking about AI, but I think data and AI go together.

They do.

At Coldshrimp, we— I hired a team that really brought— helped me understand the power of the modern data stack. Right? Like Fivetran, which is pulling the data in, DBT, which is modeling it, and then like a Census or a High Touch that's like pushing it out. And I saw the ability to do all that, and I really understood the power of the flexibility that you can have with data and how it can leverage everything. So I see, I think it's actually a really painful time right now to be a RevOps leader because the tech is, you know, it's like I remember sitting with a person at a $300 million company and they showed me their GTM setup and I was like, oh, this is terrible, right? It's like all the objects are kind of clunky. The UX is pretty mediocre. And you're stuck with Salesforce right now. I wrote an article recently that says your next CRM is your data warehouse. And I deeply believe that data will rewire the technology stack. I've been investing and advising a lot of the companies that I think have the chance to change, right? And we could go deep. There. I think the marketing automation side is gonna change faster because it's simpler. And then I think the CRM side's gonna take a little bit longer, but I envision this world in like 3 to 5 years where everything's built on flexible data. AI is leveraged into everything, and we can actually give people better UXs at the rep level. It's amazing to me. I invested in Scratchpad and I love it.

Mm-hmm.

And they always come to people and they're like, hey, we have a better UX for Salesforce and they do, but I think a lot of RevOps people like me are like, why do I need to give people a new UX? I have other problems and they have a UX and it may not be perfect, but here. And so like, you know, when you hear like, oh, we can't give them that field because it's on another object, you're like, and so I think that there's so much opportunity to improve rep experience, leverage data and leverage AI. And there's a lot of data you just can't see in Salesforce, right? Like Salesforce is just terrible at snapshotting. Data and then looking back at it and looking at pipeline coverage. And so I think I see this world and I see a better world, but I still see it a couple of years away for—

Do you think that we'll ever get to a post-CRM experience in business?

Yeah. I mean, Klaviyo shut down Salesforce, right? Like that's, that's, I know some companies that are, I, more and more of my peer group is the source of truth is now the data warehouse rather than Salesforce, which is the first step in that post-CRM. No, I mean the words CRM, customer relationship management, you still need to do. You just may not need to do it in a clunky 2000 era, pre, you know, non-flexible era.

You see the future of customer relationship management as something you do to have much better tech to be able to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. There's some really exciting, there's some really exciting companies. Like I love inflection.io. I spend a lot of time with their team. Marketo is clunky and a lot of my peer group is just done with Marketo and they understand that there's a better way and they've built it and, and they're doing amazing things with product trigger. Also, Marketo's terrible about product triggered email. Like product triggered brings a data challenge that's 100x the size of go-to-market data, which is well structured. And so I think, you know, Inflection understands that and they've been able to bring go-to-market triggered emails with product triggered emails, and they can put it in one. And so I really like that a lot.

That is amazing. That is really great. So if there's a company that is seeing the vision that wants to be able to get to a very modern go-to-market tech stack, knowing that this, this world that you envision is still a couple of years away, what would you recommend having them do now?

Data fluency, invest in the data team. It's about a, you know, it can be about a year investment to do it. At Coldshrimp, it took us a year. You're, you're building that data layer that's, that brings all of your systems together. You know, generally it's going to be in a data warehouse with ETL, reverse ETL, and data modeling. And if those terms are foreign to you and you're in RevOps, you probably should make them not foreign. And you should probably understand that stuff. It takes time, right? And generally you're going to find the data fluency in an org is going to be more with the product team, right? And increasingly so with AI right now, where it used to just be like, cool, we have the product, it pumps data out. Now you're like, we have the product, we want to pump the data out, we want to do things with it, and we want to put it back in. And so what you generally find is you have to be fluent in working with the product team. Every big company I join, I'm like, cool, so is our product talking to our CRM?

Mm-hmm.

You know, so for example, like when we add a new customer and when people change their admins, do those automatically sync for the CS team? And they generally are like, nope, they don't. And so then, then you run into the problems of, well, you could have 5 instances of the product, but 1 Salesforce account, and how do you tie those things together? And so those are common problems that you should be figuring out now to make sure your overall data architecture works. Not just as a, we sell you things at the enterprise level, but we're going to leverage all the data from our product in there. And most people are bad at it and it's going to take some real commitment from leadership and a fluent RevOps team to get there.

I love it. And, but those are the ones that are going to win.

Over time, yes. And it's hard because you don't see an immediate return. I think a lot of people are like, okay, cool, but that's like a longer-term project. And so, but you know, you probably shouldn't be a company that has 4 unintegrated acquisitions. You probably shouldn't be a company that doesn't have your product talk to there. You probably don't want 9 systems sending emails, right? Recently I was working with a company and they had 9 systems sending emails and we'd said, okay, that's cool. What system do you use for these 20 use cases? And they were like, oh, we don't know the answer. Or it's like we send some outta here and then we hack it and we send some out over here and you're just like, ooh, it's, it's bad.

Yeah, you're right. Well, as an avid user of many different email types, Right now, email is just the Wild West. Oh, man. With all of the changes and back to our data discussion, how do you think that privacy laws and, you know, this, all of the governance that is starting to come around AI is going to impact things?

I don't know. My job as a RevOps person was always to push the envelope on privacy. You know, it's like I've always dealt with private, I mean, like at Cold Champ, our privacy and security team was in Australia, right? If you read the rule book on GDPR, You basically can't do anything, but it's all gray. And so you have to slowly educate people. And so my job is to push the bounds and to get a little bit aggressive on some of that stuff. Not that we're gonna be cold emailing people all the time and, you know, we're gonna do the opt-outs as best we can, but literally you can't, you can't outbound prospect if you read GDPR fully and I've read it. And so that's not gonna work and your competitors are gonna do it. So you, you, you need to figure out how to live within that and I mean, I think it says something like, you're liable for 10% of your revenues if you do this thing in GDPR. So every security and compliance team reads that and they won't let you do anything. But no one's ever been sued for that. And so, there's—

I think, I think that we know that there are people who need to do business that are doing it in good faith. And then there are just like aggressive black hat, just really predatory tactics that you need to stay away from.

I could not agree more, Amy. It's, yeah, it's like you have to be ethical. You have to do right. You have to be like, I would be okay with that. But yes, you can ping somebody and if they say no, you should probably never ping them again. Right? Like that's pretty clear. And it's, you know, but according to GDPR, you can never ping somebody.

Yeah. That's very interesting. Well, you know, clearly Andy, you are completely at the top of your game. It's been so fun to chat even for a few minutes with you on some of the insights that you've got. And what do you do to stay at the top?

I advise a lot of awesome CEOs. Like that is, that is something that I do that I got started in and I really love the idea of advising generally, right? Like I, I remember Chris, the CEO of Sendoso, took me out to lunch after he bought Sendoso. He's like, my, my team's been really impressed with you. Let me take you out to lunch. And we had a cool lunch and again, he's like, you wanna be an advisor? I was like, I don't know what that is. I'll give you a couple shares, take my call whenever I call. And so I really love that. I don't do it for the money. I do it for helping out. So I have a couple CEOs I meet with, you know, and one in particular I meet with every week, and another one I meet with every 2 weeks, and we just talk about less about like systems and RevOps, but more like I love growth loops and scaling things, and I love learning, and I'm learning from those CEOs as well too, right?

Yeah, I feel like in, in the environment that we're in, it is such an amazing opportunity to learn and to connect business with technology, which I see as the future without, you know, question. Tell me, as a final question, tell me a little bit about what Whispered does and how can we find out more?

Whispered is built around the concept of your next role won't be posted, it'll be whispered. As you get more senior at the executive level, it's true. I think at the VP level, 80% of roles are not posted and there's lots of good reasons why companies don't and those are increasing with AI. And so, you know, 2 years ago, I basically, when I was popping my head up as CEO, failed CEO, and looking for my next role, I pinged all my friends and I said, what do you do with those little insights that people share with, when you interview with a company that you learn? And they're like, I don't know, I have a little sheet, I am dining with it. And then I said, well, what do you do when a recruiter pings you for an interesting role? And they're like, I don't know. So for the last 2 years, people have been giving us those. We have the deepest database of unposted roles out there for go-to-market leadership roles right now. We have hundreds of recruiters and talent partners that collaborate with us. We have deep, deep, deep tactics on how to do everything. But at a fundamental level, like, we give a lot of it away free, but we're dialed in for executives that believe in the value of sharing information and collaborating can make you better. And what we're really geared around is eliminating those fears when you pop your head up, right? So my network is stale. I don't know which companies are hot or which ones to avoid. You know, I don't know where the rules are and it's gonna take me 4 months to get plugged into that flow. So yeah, we are a, it's whispered.com and there are a lot of free resources and then there's the premium offering as well.

Well, I can't wait to go check it out more. Well, Andy, thank you so much for joining us today. I absolutely loved it and learned so much, and congratulations on all of your success.

Thanks, Amy.

It was great chatting. Business. Business. Business.